Background: Hepatitis B virus infection can cause both acute and chronic disease such as liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Hepatitis B vaccine is the first anticancer vaccine has outstanding record of safety and effectiveness and 95% effective in preventing children and adults from developing chronic infection, health sciences students and health care workers during their training years have a higher risk for acquiring these infections compared with the general population.
Method: The cross-sectional study was conducted among undergraduate medical students at CUHAS in Mwanza to assess knowledge, attitude and practice towards hepatitis B vaccination. Convenience sampling procedure was used where the sample being drawn from that part of population that is close to the hand and source of data was pre-tested questionnaire which was developed by using references from the studies in other literatures similar to my study where permission from every participant was requested by providing written well-informed consent from prior to each questionnaire, the collect data was entered in Excel and cleaned and then transferred in SPSS version 20 for analysis where categorical data was summarized by using proportion and percentages, then tabulated and frequencies computed by plotting histogram or other charts.
Results/discussion: Most of medical students had good knowledge and attitude but practice was not good enough since they are at high risk of getting infection and most of them gave a reason of expensive as the barrier of being vaccinated.
Conclusion: Vaccine should be made easily available to the students and patients and with affordable cost and also vaccine should be made compulsory to all medical students as suggested by most of students so as to increase coverage.